ANIMAL KINGDOM (IRISH FOCUS)

Dean Kavanagh

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Dean Kavanagh, hosted by aemi’s Daniel Fitzpatrick.

Experimental filmmaker Dean Kavanagh’s latest work is a genre-defying exploration of the cinematic apparatus. The film concerns a character (played with corporeal intensity by Cillian Roche) who happens upon a group undergoing bestial metamorphosis. Narrative is not at the forefront of what is essentially a sensory onslaught, a complex and thrilling film that is sonically and visually stunning with disturbing performances from Roche, Anja Mahler and John Curran.

A film that demands to be seen in a cinema environment , critic Fergus Daly describes it as “a film-animal, repetitively clawing out its singular territorial space. ”

An exciting addition to the catalogue of underground films made by Kavanagh and colleagues over the last decade heralding a new direction in Irish cinema.